


Weisstlander

by epitomizedTyrant



Category: RWBY
Genre: Artificer Ruby, Brawler Yang Xiao Long, Huntress Blake Belladonna, Interceptor Weiss Schnee, Sci-Fi Post Apocalypse AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-12
Packaged: 2019-02-27 23:17:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13258677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epitomizedTyrant/pseuds/epitomizedTyrant
Summary: Weiss goes south, meets some new friends and enemies, and learns the true meaning of friendship and violence.





	1. Chapter 1

The construction of the vehicles known generally as “Speeders” was often said to be more art than science. Weiss Schnee at one time would have scoffed, and said that the Atlas Engineering Corp’s designs were perfect, and their mass produced scouting vehicles were the ideal iterations of such. The body of the craft was about ten feet long, and at its widest it measured four and a quarter feet where the open “cockpit” sat. A three foot deep by four foot long storage space was built into the upper chassis, providing a strong point around which the rear of the craft was braced. It sat directly over the main thruster, which was a wide mouthed with a flared aperture that spit light blue energy, sometimes turning yellow when pushed too long.  To the left and right of the reinforced locker sat the “Flight Pods” which consisted of smaller thrusters used for steering, and the main set of hover plates and blades that sprouted out from under the boxy armor bearing a scratched out Atlas insignia. Another larger pair of hover blades, long and thing, were set jutting out and forward halfway up the nose of the craft, occasionally dipping into the snow.

However, as she sped across the snow covered drifts of Southpaw Pass she was ready to accept that the Atlas Federation had its faults. One of them was shoddy, hard to steer, rickety piece of shit snow speeders. It rattled as she pushed the accelerator on a down slope, the pods vibrating behind her send cold, cold dread through her heart.

She didn’t regret stealing the damn thing to escape, honestly she’d prefer to trudge through the snow for many more hours rather than put up with her fathers cold apathy towards his people, and his outright hatred for her. A cold death in the wastes would be better than a long one  back at Atlas, wasting away. being eaten from the inside by guilt and fear.

She took the next hill going a bit to fast, and found herself soaring through the open air, about ten feet higher than the speeders were made to hover. The cold air slammed into her mask, and she wished she could take it off and let her long white hair blow free and feel the bite of mountain air against her face as she flew through the sky.

A lesser pilot might have been tempted to close the distance between themselves and the ground as soon as possible, but diving in a speeder would do exactly that, _dive._ In a split second you would be wreckage stuck deep in the snow. She was, however, a good pilot. In the past she had believed herself to be a prodigy, but eventually she realized how much of the skill she had once laid claim to was due to the high quality vehicles she had been allow to fly, with hyper responsive mechanisms and advanced systems, but even on such a low quality vehicles she was still a _good_ pilot. It was no great feat of her ego, as she expertly held the nose high and let the speeder glide down, its hover cushion nearly bottoming out an scraping the lip of the main thruster ever so slightly through the snow.

She knew a lot of students who had barely walked away from similar crashes, and a very small number who hadn’t. She felt… not guilty, but sad, leaving them behind. She liked a few people in Atlas, though few liked her. She knew she could be a bit… intense, but the few people she knew that could put up with her she treasured. Even that annoying Flynt Coal and his lunatic friend Neon were… important to her. Though she would never tell them. They had made it their infuriating life goal to be her friend after they saw her in a moment of weakness, and despite herself they had succeeded.

No, it wasn’t guilt that plagued her, she knew they would go far in Atlas, they knew how to play the game, but it was sadness. She already could feel loneliness inching in as she sped across the blinding drifts of the valley. So alone, just like she had been as a child, after Winter moved up in the world. Just like she was when she… when… when Flynt and Neon found her. Just like she was about to be again, maybe for the rest of her life.

She shook off the troubling emotions and focused on peeling up a mountain side, a hard left from her previous path. She needed a refresher on where she was, it had been an hour since she last found high ground and it was easy to get lost in the featureless wastes. She shot up the steep and sheer mountainside, gently weaving back and forth to maintain her ascent. For a moment, at its steepest, for a single moment the engines sputtered and Weiss thought she might begin free falling hundreds of feet to certain death, but it kicked and she crested the summit. It wasn’t flat, but it was flat _enough_. She hovered looking around. The valley lay east behind her, evergreens poking out in certain patches, a slight trail of disturbed snow that would be gone tomorrow,  a pair of marauding automatons creaked around, seeing no sentient life they soon sank back into the snow to await a new sound, a new foe to rouse them from slumber.

In front of her, west, lay the more intense parts of the mountain range that the Atlas arcology often frequented. In the range rested many vassal towns that Atlas protected in exchange for goods and materials. Her mother had been born in one. She looked south. Towards her goal. Southpaw Pass would lead into the Braille Ice fields, across which lay the many many miles of foothills, beyond which Atlas’s long reach finally ended, and the snowy wastelands gave way to sparse forests and warmer climes. It would be more dangerous out there, but it would also be free. She would find a town or something and make a new life for herself. Hell, if she had to she would carve out a solitary existence in the wilderness, or die trying.

She cracked her neck, adjusted her goggles and her mask and hood and scarf and pulled against the many thick layers she wore. Pulling her riding dress down from here it had ridden up painfully she took a moment to sit and just breathe. Slow, in and out. Once she had cleared her min she gently turned the speeder back to south paw. Most pilots would do as she had previously, and gently drift and glide back down to the valley floor. She, however, was _good_ pilot, perhaps not great, but good. Her foot slammed down on the accelerator and as soon as the base of the thruster crested the edge, she twisted her left hand hard over the handle, tilting the nose straight down the cliff side. She plummeted at speeds far exceeding the parameters of her craft.

Carefully she tilted left, angling herself south-south east, letting one of the flight wings rush against the tight packed mountain snow. An arcing trail of snow followed her as she carved a line into the mountain, and a light rumble soon turned deep, her personal avalanche tumbling into the valley, shooting up great blasts of powdery snow, making the valley behind impassable. She didn’t think she was being followed before, but now she could be sure she was alone. Weiss let a happy grin play across her face as her speeder shot out ten times faster than it was designed to move over the Braille Ice fields.

Once it had been a great lake, now it was just a white plain dotted with mysterious bumps that gave it the name. Her speeder  slowed to a sane speed over a minute or so, but her massive boost put the craft near the middle by the time it ran out. She deftly weaved between the strange bumps, she was starting to understand the craft a little more, instinctively compensating for the left pull, slow pumping the accelerator when the speed maxed out… she angled the nose at a bump that stood directly south and boosted the forward plates and decreased the output of the flight pods, then roughly slammed the accelerator.

The speeder shot up, easily arcing over the hill and landing gently on the other side  without missing a beat or losing a bit of speed. For the first time in a long time she laughed. This was the life Weiss had sought for herself, at the flight academy. She could have, no, would have been the best Interceptor to ever come out of Atlas. Interceptor Weiss Schnee. Just remembering her lost dreams chased away her happiness and she pushed the accelerator, tearing across the snowfields. She had days of travel ahead, but she knew her father would send people after her, and she intended to be far beyond their reach.

 

 

The fact that the forward flight plates dipped into the snow hadn’t been a problem when she had snow-covered plains and mountains to fly around on constantly. It wasn’t a deal breaker, once she got to the taiga, but it did present a challenge. With the forward hover blades partially retracted, she lost a considerable amount of steering capability, and some speed. Luckily the taiga was pretty flat and empty, the brush was too small or too weak to be an issue and there was a strange lack of Automatons. Not that the mountain region’s surface was home to many anyway, but usually there was one in sight somewhere, keeping their eternal vigil, hunting any who dared wander too close. Muted browns and reds, curved chassis and pipes, long grasping arms and axes crackling with blue or orange energy. Despite their diverse body types, all of them had a single purpose left to them.

She drifted as she flew nearly falling asleep in spite of the loudness of the engines. It felt like days since she had slept. After a week planning her escape, a day setting it up, and a nearly a day of traveling it might as well have been. She was exhausted, but she couldn’t stop inside Atlas territory, not only because she was likely being pursued but she also didn’t particularly want to sleep out in the cold.

Sometimes she found herself looking back over the strange taiga, towards the mountains.  All around the plain she could see the foothills, in front and to her sides, then mountains to her back. Surely nothing natural carved out the miles of flat ground amongst the plains, but she was no scholar. Maybe that little blue girl that hung out with Flynt would know. Maybe no one knew. Another thing lost to time.

 

 

As she left the taiga behind and was surrounded by the rolling foothills she nearly wished that she had been pursued, something, anything to break up the incredible boredom. Twenty nine hours. Twenty nine hours of straight driving, she was pushing it. She knew she was asking for disaster when she kept pushing the speeder. It was made for long scouting missions, but its engines were whining for rest, in the warming temperatures heat radiated off of the hover blades. She didn’t have long until she stopped or the vehicle stopped _her_. A map would have been nice, in hindsight. Or researching one. Or, anything really that could have told her where the hell she was.

She had been weaving through the foothills for about an hour, holding true to the little compass on her central console. South. Always south. A particularly high hill rose to her west. Still too cold, still devoid of trees, just tufts of grass. Weiss leaned right and pulled back on the handles so she glided gently up the hill. Here she would set down for a few minutes, let the engine cool, do a little maintenance, and see if she could see beyond the foothills at last.

The vehicle hissed in relief as it retracted the hover blades and dropped to the ground, as did Weiss. She popped open the locker, pulling out a tool box and a nutrient block. Quite possibly the most vile creation of atlas, nutrient blocks were all the average person needed to survive and thrive. They tasted like the underside of an engine block and looked like compressed taiga grass. Nevertheless she bit into one as she looked south.

Night was falling, the sky was painted in beautiful shades of pink and red, it seemed fitting to her. This was her final day as a citizen of Atlas. After this, she would be free, no longer a slave to her fathers demands, or a target for his wrath. Night was setting on the Atlesian Weiss Schnee, Daughter of Jacques and Star Pupil of the Interceptors, and tomorrow the sun would raise on the Stateless Weiss, Free woman.

She could see them, maybe another three miles away. The tops of trees, just barely poking over the hills. Minutes, she had been minutes away when she stopped. It couldn’t be helped, she supposed as she opened the diagnostic panel. All but one of the lights were yellow, and the last was red. Well, she’d fix that first, then find a campsite in the forest before doing the maintenance the rest called for.

It didn’t take long to hunt down the malfunctioning part. It wasn’t terribly hard to fix, and was likely the source of that left pull. One of the hover plates on the left flight pod had a deep dent along its midsection that had cut off power to the rest of the blade. It was a simple fix, hammer back into place what she could and apply some quick fix silver epoxy and it was nearly good as new. She took the time to service the flight pods before checking the diagnostic panel and sure enough, she now had six green lights glowing amongst an amber sea. It was good enough. She climbed back aboard and sped off south once more, not looking back even once in the short time it took to leave the barren foothills and enter a cool boreal forest.

 

 

The forest slowed her, moving too fast seemed like it could be quite dangerous,  but soon enough she found a little overhang to set down by. Steam poured out of the engine block as it powered off. She stood and stretched, taking in the sounds of the forest. She could hear birds chirping and a gently breeze rustling through the tall pines over the sound of her own heart. It was incredibly quiet. For someone who’d lived their entire life either on the Atlas arcology or riding on loud machines, the silence was almost deafening. No humming lights, no hissing pipes, not even another human voice.

Night was beautiful here. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, giving her a clear view of the stars and the parts of the ring that were still illuminated. Ciel told her that the rings had once been the moon, or moons, of Remnant. According to her it had been blasted to hell during the collapse. Back then the oceans had been rough and tumultuous places, full of waves and life, rather than stagnant masses of water. Out there, in the waters, it was death for any human who dared venture beyond the shore. There were battleships, and mechanical leviathans that floated far off the shore. Once when the Atlas arcology moved a bit to close to the ocean she had pulled out a pair of binoculars and watched the horizon. She saw dozens of tiny ships, floating out there, glowing blue lines covering the warcraft, yellow darting around at right angles on the maintenance automatons. Then she looked beyond them. Far out on the edge of the horizon she had seen it. It was different, while the other machines seemed to drift aimlessly or wander about the world, this… behemoth seemed to wait. Watching the arcology, almost. For a moment she looked at it, and for long, chilling moment it had looked back at her, silver slits looking back across miles of still ocean. Perhaps she had just imagined it, she couldn’t really be sure they were even eyes, but it _felt_ like she was looking in to the eyes of doom.

Somewhere out in the forest there were more of those machines. Once or twice as she tried to sleep through the night she thought she caught a glimpse of orange through the underbrush, but she stayed quiet and was left alone. It must have been midnight by the time she finally got her eyes to close.

 

 

She woke to the sound of another vehicle. Her eyes snapped open and she leapt to her feet, grabbing her pillow on the way up. The vehicle in question was coming tow- no, three vehicles in a formation, dodging through the woods. Two smaller brown vehicles with similar builds to her snow speeder, though they appeared to have leather stretched across them rather than armor, were following a larger lead speeder with a yellow and black paintjob. It looked bulky, like it was properly armored. Its rider made a hand signal and the two craft split off to start circling and Yellow moved towards her, menacingly. The rider was wearing a smooth yellow helmet with a black eye shield, a long brown leather coat and her golden hair spilled out from under the helmet. On her right arm was tied a strange purple cloth.

Bandits. Definitely bandits. Weiss stowed the pillow in one swift motion as she jumped on to her speeder and revved its engines. She wasn’t going to be fast enough. Wrong environment, she couldn’t fully extend the forward blades which made accelerating too much too fast a very real threat. The only advantage she may have is extra maneuverability moving slower would give her. She had to try anyway. Like hell was she going to give up on her first day of freedom to a bunch of no class bandits.

She waited, as Yellow grew closer and the two browns circled, she waited, then she counts, Yellow was almost on her now… And she punched it. The initial acceleration shot her south and she timed her plan perfectly, the armored nose of the snow speeder clipped and bit into one of the brown speeders diminutive flight pods, ripping it completely off the craft as she shot by.

It felt… good. Dodging through the trees, nailing that bandit. It made her feel so alive. She looked back, Goldie was on her tail but the other speeder had dropped back to help the wounded one. That made things a bit less complicated. And then Weiss saw two plates slide back on the front of the round chassis, revealing a pair of barrels.

 _Fuck!_ She dodged hard right as a burst of gunfire tore through trees where she had been. She wasn’t armed to be chased, hell she was barely armed, the single energy repeater she had was hull-fused and pointing straight ahead. She dodged left this time, once again evading the dual machine guns. The bursts were so short her pursuer must have been conserving ammunition, and with her opponents weightier craft she was still just barely closing in. Maybe, if Weiss got lucky she could find a body of water and extend her front blades, that would give her the speed she needed to escape.

As she looked for signs a clearing another burst of gunfire rang out. She didn’t dodge. Most of the bullets whizzed by, but won tore through her right shoulder, and two more hit the main thruster. It sputtered and coughed. Vertigo was followed by the sound of her speeder smashing into the ground, jerking her head forward and bouncing it off her dashboard.


	2. Chapter 2

 

_Fuck you tree._

_Thwack._

_Ha. Get fucked, nature, Ruby wins again._

God she needed some friends. She walked around the felled tree, letting her cape billow out behind her. She ceased pumping energy into the axe and its silver hard light blades fizzled into nothingness. She folded it in two its two halves and stowed it on her back above her swords and blaster. She knelt by the tree, reaching her right arm under it and exhaling. _Lift with your legs, not your back._ She joked to herself as she hoisted the recently felled tree on to her shoulder, pushing aside her cloak to let it rest on the thick pualdron. She hated _chores_. She was the premier Artificer of this generation! Not that anyone knew, because at some point she had decided to be secretive about her… bah. She chucked the tree onto her little wagon where it joined five of its bastard brethren.

Might as well get seven, skip doing this for a couple more days. She walked back through the forest, beckoning the hovering cart. Her eyes played over the trees, looking for one properly tall and thick enough to add to the pile.

Most of the trees were relatively young, the arcology that harvested these lands liked to replant, good on them. Ah, there was a tree. Tall, sturdy enough. she poked it, looking it up and down for signs of parasites or anything else undesirable.

She heard the rustling in the underbrush before someone tripped into her. Which was odd, usually this forest was as deserted as anywhere else. Even the robots hadn’t wandered back in after she harvested the ones that were around. So she turned to see a young woman with black hair and a black coat looking up at her. She was beat to hell, muddy and bloodied. Poor thing. Her eyes had a flash of hope and then filled with fear as she scrambled back on all fours. A silver display popped up indicating her already high heartrate had just fluctuated. She was injured too, some of the cuts were deep. None of them were burns though, so it must have been conventional blades.

Oh, that was why she was so scared. She had almost forgotten what she was wearing. Welp. She reached back for her axe as three men and a woman popped out of the under brush behind the little runner. Seriously how had she not seen them coming up. They weren’t being stealthy. The leader held a sheathed katana at his side. It definitely had artifice built into it. Cool. His coat was a lot less cool, as was his stupid spiky hair and little eye mask.

The other three were… mooks. Just some idiots who latched on to a “cool” bandit, probably. They were looking at her too, worried, but not terrified. They probably should be.

“Well well well Blake, I hope you weren’t expecting that hunk of junk to protect you. Ill tear it to pieces and then you’ll be just as alone and vulnerable as ever.” Spiky Dumb sneered at the cute girl. Fuck.

She held her left arm out to the side as mechanically as possible, keeping up the illusion that she was in fact just another automaton. It spoke measures about this mans intelligence that he hadn’t picked up on the fact she was wearing a cloak, had a multitude of additional modules attached, or that her X plate visor was glowing silver rather than the orange or blue of the machines he was used to seeing. She flicked her wrist, extending the handle of her axe to its fullest, about four feet, and then pushed energy into it. It hissed and crackled as the oversized blade formed, its slivery head flat and hatefully curved.

She should kill them all, including the injured woman. That was the correct thing to do. But it just felt wrong. She really hated feeling bad for the woman. She was a threat, probably. But… it didn’t seem right. Long ago she wanted to help people, right? That’s why she had… before… She sighed, though no one could hear her breath, rather they heard the pneumatic hiss as her shoulders collapsed and her head tilted forward ever so slightly. As she advanced Spiky took a stance, sword still not drawn. She knew what he was doing, both the way of fighting and how he thought to trick her.

Most Marauders and Phalanx would fall for it. Sometimes a blue would know that its opponent was tricking them, but that was rare. Of course, she wasn’t a Marauder or a Phalanx, she was just walking attached to an amalgam of their reanimated corpses. So, when she got close enough, and he drew, blue energy crackling along the edge of his katana as he sliced up hard she stepped left and twisted at the last moment, and spun the butt of her axe around smashing him in the face.

He staggered and she reached out with her right hand as he looked back at her in fear, blood spilling from his busted lip. She grabbed his face with her oversized palm and lifted him off the ground. He panicked, dropping his sword and scrabbling at her metal covered arm, trying to grab at anything at all. He made the spectacularly poor choice of grabbing a hydraulic which was just barely not covered by armor plates at her current hand rotation, so when she turned and chucked him into one of his mooks that had been charging up behind her with a polearm his fingers were crunched between the plate and the hydraulic. He sailed past the polearm and smashed into the bandit, clutching his maimed hand. Behind her the other two mooks had decided to put up or shut up. Both charged her, the left one with a hammer, the right with and axe. Neither were artificed in any way, not that it would have mattered.

She didn’t do anything fancy. She didn’t need to. She spun again, putting her axe up over her right shoulder and bringing it down as the mooks ran past, the five foot long blade cleaving them both in twain. It was really kind of sad, if she was being honest. What a pointless way to die.

That left the other two. Spiky and Poley. Both had regained their footing in those few seconds, Poley had decided to run. _Sorry Poley, no running from this fight._ She reached behind her back for her blaster but paused. Poley was only about ten yards away, and she had been practicing… her hand dropped to her thigh and grabbed a small cylinder, which she pumped  energy into and drew back over her head… the little cylinder crackled as it extended a silver trapezoid, tapered and incredibly sharp on the ends. She lined it up and threw.

To an observer, the throw would have looked more like a catapult firing, such force and speed were released in such a short motion that the streak of silver light that whistled through the air and embedded itself in the skull of the polearm mook would have looked a lot like a very slow repeater blast.

She finally broke her robot act with an impulsive fist pump of victory. _Oh yeah, whos the bad assest artificer, its me. I am the bad assest._

Spikey finally looked truly scared. Good. He dived for his sword as soon she took a step towards him and she dashed forwards as well. His hand wrapped around the blade but it wouldn’t budge. A large metal foot rested on the blade, and he looked up into the blank silver glowing X that was looking back down at him. He felt like he was being sized up like a piece of meat gets careful planning from a butcher before it cuts.

He wasn’t wrong. Ruby scanned him, her visor pointing out little things. She found what she was looking for. A blue artifice rig was implanted on his left arm. It was pretty new too. It was deep enough that she couldn’t just rip it out. She would have to take him back to her tool table. Or.

She made a quick vertical slash with her axe, lopping of the arm in one go. She paused then, slightly unsure of herself. Well, best offer at least.

“ _Hey._ ” Voice rang out over the screams of Spikey, the mechanical tone that masked her voice probably scaring the poor girl even more. “ _He’s yours, if you want him. His life that is, its yours to claim. If it would ya know, make you feel better.”_ Her eyes widened and she shook her head scooting away a little more.

Ruby shrugged and kicked him in the face sending him sprawling out on his back. Then she hopped, landing with both metal feet, and all of her four hundred pounds directly on to his face. His skull popped, sending gore everywhere. The cute raven head screamed.

“ _Sorry. It occurs that maybe that was… oh you passed out._ ” Her scanner played over the woman. “ _From blood loss, well at least you aren’t a wimp. Oh fuck, I have to patch you up don’t I?_ ”

She knelt over the woman after looting a bit of medical supplies off the corpse. The best she could do at the moment was stop the blood loss, which put her in stable condition. Blood type A huh.

 _Nope._ Spikey was B

Axe was B.

Hammer was AB. Would that work? Probably not.

She looked at the body of Poley. A. Of course the one that died the farthest. She had to retrieve her knife anyway.

It took her ten minutes to loot the bodies and load up… Blake? The corpse of Poley, and her small pile of loot on the sled, on top of her lumber. Sod it, six was enough for a few days. She beckoned the little sled forward, Spikeys bloody arm slung over her shoulder. Why was she helping this perfect stranger? She should just leave her out to die. But she was… kinda perfect. Stupid cute bow. Stupid crushing loneliness.

She accessed her archive. She should read up on blood transfusions a bit before she did one, probably.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh hey, ruby and blake are here too.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sure, Weiss got captured by bandits, Blake may have bled to death, and Ruby is acting a little strange, but at least Yangs having a good day. Right?

 

Her beloved Bumblebee hovered to a stop beside the wrecked speeder, letting Yang gracefully hop off. She cracked her knuckles menacingly in the direction of the speeder, but realized it was pointless. The operator was slumped forwards onto their dashboard, goggles askew but still covering the face. The speeder itself was mostly undamaged, just dirty and of course that big old thruster was busted, but both should be easy fixes for an Artificer.

She pulled the white clothed person back to check their wounds. One bullet wound, straight in and out through the shoulder, minor bleeding, and possible head trauma. Yang hoped she hadn’t killed them, she may be a bandit but she wasn’t a monster. She pulled up the hat, revealing the top of her victims head. It was pale, and as soon as the hat came off it released a waterfall of silky white hair. Her forehead showed no sign of trauma after a quick inspection, so she shrugged and pulled off the scarf and goggles.

Oh.

Oh no.

She was hot.

Yang quickly wrapped the scarf back around the woman’s face, grateful for her opaque helmet suddenly. She couldn’t let those two assholes who were with her catch her blushing.

What was she going to do. Tie up the person, first. She did, with a little rope, and carried the unconscious and still bleeding woman over to Bumblebee. She did w

Hat she could to stop the bleeding and tossed her prisoner over the second seat of

Her speeder. This… didn’t feel great. Nothing about the tribe had recently, if she was being honest. They were fine, for the first time in a long time they were totally fine. But they were still raiding. Still stealing from others, just now from people worse off.

For the first time everything she knew felt wrong, and she had no idea what to do about it.

She knew what to do about the speeder however. She pulled out her radio and slid it into s dashboard slot on Bumblebee where its small display was light with orange artifice. Damn, of course there was a jammer nearby. The radio only had a range of ten miles normally, ambient interference made it impossible to communicate via radio any farther than that no matter how powerful the signal, but she wasn’t able to pick up anything at all. Which meant that there was a jammer prowling nearby, and that was incredibly bad.

Jammers were impish automatons, they only stood about three feet tall, and most of their tiny bodies were made up of the signal jamming equipment that gave them their names. They ran around on two stumpy little legs and long thing arms that were as far as she knew incapable of wielding a weapon of any sort. Their little sphere like heads creeped her the fuck out, the only time she had seen one before. Its little single beady eye glowed orange at her from behind the Centurion it was riding on as she had been dragged away. that had been a bad night.

Damn it. She pulled out a radio beacon and tossed it down by the crashed speeder and took out a camouflage sheet from Bumblebees rear storage and tossed it over, hoping to hide her prize from wandering eyes, and leapt back on to bumblebee, and revving the engine. Artifice flowed through the craft, illuminating her dashboard and firing up her hover blades. She made sure her… _prisoner_ was secure and sped off towards her friends.

Bumblebee was not as spry a craft as the white speeder, she was faster and more agile than the other speeders the Branwen tribe held, but she was still a combat craft. She was thick, and her yellow armored chassis sloped outwards from the cockpit and rounded in very quickly towards the front. Raven had once said it looked like a yellow cucumber made of steel, and as undignified as the description was it fit rather well. Its rear flight pods were a rarer sort, each had a pair of small thrusters, stacked, the bottom ones pointing down and away from the craft ever so slightly. The main thruster wasn’t a circle like the other craft either, rather it had a more rectangular shape but it sat in largely the same position.

Regardless the heavy craft had little problem dashing through the trees soon bringing her to the two assholes she had brought with her.

The pair of them were standing by the speeder that Snow Angel had destroyed, apparently trying to fix it. Idiots. They both turned to her as she hovered low beside them.

“Hey idiots, you have a minute to grab what you can and toss it on the other bike, we’re bailing for now.”

“What?” The woman slurred, lifting her low quality visor. “But my bike!”

“I don’t care, we’re being jammed, I don’t want to deal with whatever is with the jammer with just you fuckwits to back me up. We. Are. Bailing.”

“W-we’re being jammed?” the blonde douchebag stammered.

“That’s what I just said, now grab what you can and hop on the other bike, we’re leaving. I dropped a beacon by this ones speeder, so we can come back.” She glanced at the brunette, “Ill drop one here too if it makes you feel better.”

The bandit nodded and Yang tossed her second beacon down by the bike.

“So you’re gonna tell Raven that we lost a bike right? On this patrol?” the blonde snaggletooth grinned at her as he climbed on the other brown speeder.

“Fuck off Shay… yeah. Ill tell her.” She grimaced. They could always comeback, better to run than risk running into a centurion or some bastions while under jamming. Or worse. The sound of fog horns haunted the back of her mind.

The two dunces finished up and soon they peeled off towards camp. She caught sight of it, for a moment as they ran. The jammer was hopping around on the ground, the stupid machine attached to something else by strands of orange energy. Above, stood something none of them had seen before. It looked like the engine car of a train had sprouted a pair of thick stubby legs and arms, the hands of which looked like some bizarre three pronged rock crusher. Its face followed her slightly, its massive and incredibly bright orange eye glaring at her, but not moving to attack. It looked like it had a beard made of chains.

And in an instant they were far past the strange automaton. The three of them shared a look. That wasn’t something they would soon forget. That single eye was hateful. And new. They rode on in silence.

It was half an hour before their radios crackled to life, easily putting them sixty or seventy miles from the jammer they saw. She flicked her radio as it searched for a signal. It took it a full minute to zero in on one of the booster towers.

“Hello, is anyone receiving?” she shouted into the channel they used.

_“Yang? That you?”_

“Yeah its me, we just got out from under a jamming net at least sixty miles long.”

“ _Damn, we were wondering why Childes and the rest hadn’t reported in._ ”

“Yeah, I’ve got some stuff to report too. Want me to tell you over the radio or just come back to base?”

“ _Do you need rearming or repairs?_ ”

“Nah, I just have some cargo I need to off load.”

“ _Report en route, we want you to go back into the deadzone and find Childes. He and his aren’t the only ones we have out but they were closest. We are sending Vernal and Hawke after the others._ ”

“Alright. Early this morning we came across a woman with a white speeder camped under an overhang, we were about to attempt a hold up when she mounted her speeder and rammed one of ours, disabling it. I pursued and damaged her main thruster, knocking her unconscious in the process. I took her prisoner, but we lost a speeder. I dropped beacons by both her speeder and ours but that jamming field… yeah. We also ran across a new auto, we decided not to engage.”

“ _What are you planning to do with that prisoner?_ ”

“I dunno, she had a nice speeder, so, I geuss have her show us how to drive it, see if we can get anything else out of her…” _Apologize profusely and ask her out-no wait stop that._

“ _Hm, alright. Maybe keep the last two to yourself Casanova. Pretty sure that’s bad form with someone you are literally holding captive._ ”

“Damn it. That was a joke. Shut up. Tell no one, May. I swear to all that burns I will through you to the machines.”

“ _Alright alright. Drop your crush and your minions off here asap._ ”

She growled and twisted the accelerator, pointlessly since she was already at max cruising speed but it was a satisfying alternative to the diminutive snipers throat.

Shay grinned at her from under his stupid little goggles. She stared him dead in the eye and clicked the button that deployed the two machineguns built into the front of Bumblebee and he stopped grinning.

They rode silently back into camp. It wasn’t a grand affair, just a ring of wooden poles surrounding a camp of around a hundred people.  The sleeping tents were all on one side of the camp, directly across a small path from the work areas where they kept the small speeder fleet, the workshops, Vernals artifice hut, and the makeshift prisons where she dropped off the Snow Angel. They were empty, Raven didn’t like dealing with human trafficking or the cycles of revenge that would come from assassination. Apparently before she put herself in charge they had, and once they pissed off the wrong person they lost nearly sixty people after some farmhand lured a centurion and some marauders in during the dead of night. Apparently the tribe had sold his son and daughter to some farm out west.

She avoided Raven as she dropped off her prisoner. Unfortunately she had to talk to Vernal, she wanted to have Bumblebee get a quick little check up. Sure it was a paranoid thing to assume, but that new auto had really freaked her out. She wanted to take no chances on it.

She ducked into Vernals tent to find her pulling on her riding gear. Yang had forgotten that Vernal was getting deployed too. Vernal was just a bit older than Yang, but apparently she was a bit of a prodigy with Artifice. Her half pulled on jumpsuit left her right arm bare, the artifice core that was buried in it was clearly visible. It was planted on her bicep, the strange metal of the autos formed a little square plate that wrapped halfway around her arm. Little blue lines traced out along her skin in angular lines across her skin, reaching all the way to her fingertips. The core itself was a circle with slices cut out, and then a smaller circle placed at the center. Blue energy swirled through it, sometimes sparking out. A few strands of whispy energy would float away from it every few seconds.

“Yang.” She said, completely un deterred by her bosses daughter walking in on her half naked.

Yang looked away, realizing she had stared for a second longer than was comfortable. “Hey Vernal. Could you take a quick look at the bae before you take off? Saw a new auto today and it just kinda… stared. Wanted to make sure it didn’t do anything freaky to me engines.”

Vernal chuckled and pulled on her jumpsuit. “Sure, I’ll just do a quick glance. I assume you heard?”

“About all our missing people? Yeah, I just got back we were out in the… damn, its big enough to be a deadzone huh? We were out there when it popped up.”

“Creepy huh.” She grinned. “Lets go.”

Vernals inspection was very short indeed. It took her less than a minute to touch a few conduits of orange and poke the core and declare it “Completely normal.”

Yang sped out on Bumblebee minutes later. Straight back into the goddamned deadzone.

She followed the last known bearing of Childes and crew for a solid hour, folloing a winding path to cover as muche ground as possible. They had taken the Rig out to a deposit of ore they found not too long ago to pick it up before an archology found it.

That was where they were most likely to be, just drilling and finishing up their job before returning to base, no doubt thinking that having all hands on deck was better than having one person go off alone. There was some hypocrisy in sending her out here, she supposed, but she didn’t really care.

She stopped at one of their ramshackle watchtowers that was a couple miles from the location. They were little quickly constructed things, just ladders up the sides of trees leading to little crows nests above the canopy of fir and oak. When she got to the top she could immediately see that something was wrong. She could see the drill location, just barely off in the distance. It was a little rocky hill that broke the tree line. It had always looked unnatural, the way it stood out in the middle of nowhere all alone. There was something drilling there for sure. A tower of the brownish metal that the autos were made of stood atop a platform, all of it pulsing with orange light. She looked through her binoculars. Two marauders stood looking out from the platform form, blue eyes mechanically scanning back and forth. She knew they weren’t alone though, she could see the tip of an artifice weapon poking up above the smaller trees on the hill, patrolling around the base. Damn it. Under the platform she could see chunks of the bandit rig, scattered beside a corpse with a familiar coat.

Childes squad was dead. They lost the rig. And the autos were mining. She frowned even deeper and turned her eyes back to the autos on the platform. No the marauders looked just like every other marauder. But, the autos were just dumb murder machines. Not things that gave evil glares and mined. Everything about today was wrong.

No. She had only seen one dead, maybe… maybe she could still rescue someone. She scrambled to Bumblebee and hopped on, aiming for the mining site. She grit her teeth, squared her shoulders and opened up her weapon bays.

She rocketed through the verdant forest, hoping beyond hope. All her hopes were dashed to hell when she shot into the clearing. The automatons had cleared out a large swathe of trees around the hill, all that was left were stumps and the wreckage of her tribes vehicles, and bodies. The patrolling centurion turned and looked at her, preparing its artifice glaive. It was a massive beast, standing twenty feet tall and constructed for battle. Blue artifice whisped off the conduits lining centaur body.

Yang screamed a wordless warcry and opened fire, pelting the beast with bullets. Its body lit up with sparks, but it barely flinched. Yang sagged, and as it readied to charge she turned Bumblebee away and fled.


	4. Chapter 4

 

Consciousness returned to her slowly, crackly and blue at the edges. Slowly the delirium formed into a room. It was round, like some kind of dome made from the same stuff as the automatons, though it seemed more hewn than cast. Above her a complex network of blue and orange conduits covered a strange bumpy cylinder. She was in some kind of chair, like an operating table she supposed. The walls were covered in seams and grooves, and more conduits of artifice.

Blake found that she was very uncomfortable when consciousness fully realized itself upon her. She ached all over, like she had run for ten miles and fainted from blood loss. Ah, right, she had run teen miles and then fainted from blood loss last thing she remembered. Things got blurry, toward the end of the previous time she was conscious.

She remembered running from Adam for a long time, and then she bumped into what she thought was a person in a red cape, but when it turned around…

_The figure turned to her, and she reeled, scrabbling back. It wasn’t a person at all. The Automaton was shorter than most, and it looked bulkier too, it armor was thicker and modified. A bandolier fell across its chest, underneath the long red cloak that had made her think it was a person in the first place. But it was different than any machine she had ever seen in another way too. Instead of orange or blue energy running along its conduits, which were fewer she noted, it burned with silvery light, bright and harsh. Its face was made of a thick glowing silver X, the upper arms slight thicker than the lower and the whole thing compressed downward slightly._

_It looked down on her, like it was thinking, and then Adam broke through the underbrush behind her. She couldn’t tell what he said but the automaton ignored her and lifted its arm straight out, mechanically flicking a haft open of some energy weapon. As it walked forward silver plates of pure energy formed into the vague shape of a stylized axe. Adam waited, as though he knew exactly what the machine would do, and struck the moment it got close enough. however it reacted in a way he obviously didn’t expect, stepping aside and grabbing his face. It chucked him into Bet and they went flying back. Cody and Will charged up behind the machine but it spun out of the way and cute them both down in one swing._

_She blacked out for a moment, but was conscious enough to hear the machine garble out some sort of speech, looking at her. She shook her head, begging any gods that were listening for deliverance, and then the machine hopped into the air, and crushed Adams head beneath its boots. It struck her that she should be happy, but the situation just seemed horrible. Everything went black._

She looked down. Her clothes were drenched in dried blood. Her left side was nearly a single crimson cake. She gagged at the scent, the smell of blood was impossibly thick. There was no way she had bled that much. Something in her right arm tingled, but she was more distracted by the humming coming from the next room. Soon enough, a person walked through the door carrying some kind of box. She was just under six feet tall, and had a youthful face, adorned with black hair ending in red tips and the glowing orange eyes of an artificer. Her body… was exactly the same as the automaton from last night, though cleaned and missing its cloak. That and the conduits glowed orange now, instead of silver.

“Who, are you?” Blake croaked. Her throat still felt sore from screaming, so she must not have been out long.

“OH! You’re awake! Good, good.” Her Host set down her box and walked over and started poking her.

“Ouch, stop that! Who are you and why am I covered in blood?” She demanded, her voice a bit more normal this time.

“I am Ruby Rose, and the blood is, well you lost a lot of blood yesterday.”

“I don’t think I lost this much!”

“No, you didn’t. But you had lost enough I thought I should do a blood transfusion, ya know, just to be safe.” She grinned sheepishly.

Blake chose to remain silent.

“And, well, one of those bandits had a matching blood type. Probably. And, well… Blood transfusion is more of an art than a science anyway. And man am I bad at art…”

“So, how much of their blood is in me, and how much is on me.” Blake asked with a sigh. At least whoever saved her had a sense of humor, she supposed.

“About half is on you. The rest I had to mop up.” Her… savior? Captor? Suddenly lost all the joy in their voice, replacing it with a somber tone. “Listen. I did something while you were out, to save your life. I couldn’t get the transfer to work and you were running out of time. And I couldn’t… I couldn’t just let you die for some reason. So I did something without your consent, and I’m incredibly sorry.”

Of course, nothing could ever be easy. “W-what did you do?”

“Im not a doctor. I don’t know how to fix injuries, or encourage blood production, so I did the only thing I knew how to do. You needed healing, so I implanted an artifice core into your arm. Its healing properties are why you didn’t. ya know, die.”

“Oh. Well, thank you, for saving me. You don’t need to apologize, you did what you had to.”

Ruby didn’t look relieved at that. She still looked guilty, and a bit sad. “There are always choices in life. Its cruel to have one stolen.”

Okay, Blake had clearly stepped into some emotional bogland she wasn’t qualified to explore, so she changed the topic. “Do you have a shower, and some extra clothes I could borrow until I can repay you?”

Ruby blushed at that, her mood instantly changing from serious to awkward, “No no, you don’t need to repay me its fine. You can wash off in the basin out back. And, of course I have clothes! Who doesn’t have clothes, some weirdo probably.”

Ruby left her alone to go out and bathe. She pulled off her clothing, coat first, the bloody thing was ruined. Not for the first time she felt nauseated thinking about Bet’s blood… had Ruby hung her up like a bloodbag and accidentally sprayed her blood all over the place with a rebellious tube… She didn’t like connecting the cheery face with the draconian first aid, and that silver monster from the night before…

Her hand brushed against her right arm as she undressed. Slowly she looked to the device Ruby had implanted into her. At first it looked like the only modification to her arm was the thick and short cylinder that protruded from it. The top face had little windows in a fan pattern that revealed the blue storm of artifice. After a second she saw the extent of the changes. Blue lines crept out from the device, fading and reappearing elsewhere down her arm. And across her shoulder. She supposed that if she had a mirror she would be looking into eyes that stormed with the same blue artifice.

She wondered why Ruby had given her blue. It was common knowledge that blue was far more powerful than orange,  which the strange artificer herself had. “Strange artificer” was a rather redundant description, she had yet to meet a proper artificer who wasn’t a little crazy.

Blake concentrated on the device, trying to feel for the energy or… something. She… would have to ask how to do all this stuff too. She had a lot of questions, and no place to go. Fuck, she couldn’t go back to the fang, not that she wanted to, but she had no idea where the Menagerie arcology even was these days.

Fuck. She sat down in the basin. She escaped Adams… Abuse. She could say it, think it. She survived him, but now she was lost and at the mercy of an eclectic artificer. She curled up in a ball and cried, silently, like she had learned to.

“Hey the water can be kinda funky to turn… on…” Ruby walked outside with her, when Blake looked up she saw a look of concern and Ruby holding an armful of various clothes. She sat them down gently and walked over to the tub. She could hear the whirr and hiss of the armor Ruby still hadn’t taken off as she knelt beside Blake.

“Hey.” One metal clad hand reached out to Blakes shoulder. It was… oddly comforting. It didn’t feel like someone touching her through armor, it just felt like a cold hand. Maybe she was delirious from bloodloss still. “Hey let it out, however you need to. Can I help you with anything?” Blake shook her head. “Here. Ill show you how to turn on the water, then leave you be. Ill be. Around.” She made a circle motion with her hand, sort of pointing everywhere and nowhere. She explained the little pumping system, as well as the strange water heater. The tub had seven valves to open and close, but eventually it was pretty clear that only three were important for cleaning herself.

Awkwardly Ruby stood up and walked toward the door, glancing back every other step. “Wait.” Ruby turned back to Blake. “Why are you doing all this for me? You don’t even know me?”

Ruby looked back, and thought for a moment. “I suppose when I sold my soul my heart stayed put.” She said and walked away. Blake just lay there breathing, thinking about the day, what Ruby had said, about what her future held, picking up her scattered mind for what must have been hours before feeling ready to face the rain.

 

Blake wandered back into the house, dressed in an overly large white smock, and a thin black jacket. It was… the best of the clothes Ruby had brought out, clearly none of which were hers.

She found Ruby in the third room around the strange structure. It was a series of dome rooms, the largest stood in the center, with a ring of the smaller circles around the outside. Ruby was in one of the smaller circles, manipulating a few artifice tools that hung on convoluted arms from the ceiling. She sidled around to see the strange thing she was working on.

It was some sort of drill on the end of a chainsaw grip, but the tip was open, and after a moment she realized that the “drill” was a series of small metal chunks mounted on a series of wheels that changed direction every other layer. Instead of a drill tip it was open, but all she could see down the hole were a few glints of a different metal.

“What is that?” Blake asked.

“This? Oh, it’s a laser drill! It shoots a weak beam of artifice to destabilize rocks, and then you use the drill to cut the rock away! I’m just about done, we can go test it after if you want.”

“Okay… How do you, use artifice?”

Ruby set her tools down for a moment, or rather she let go of them a little above her workspace and the arms held them there. She turned to Blake and picked up her hand, eyeing it carefully, turning her palm up and looking at it about an inch from her face, tongue out in concentration. It was a rather endearing display. Apparently satisfied she let gently let go, her metal finger tips once again being one of the gentlest touches Blake had experienced. “I suppose you tried then?” Blake nodded. “Good, proactive that’s good. Unfortunately the artifice hasn’t built pathways through your arm yet, and part of your head isn’t finished either. Only one of your eyes is blue.”

Ruby returned to her project as Blake asked a new question. “Why did you give me a blue core? Why did you give me a more valuable core when you could have just given me an orange?”

Ruby barked a laugh, hearty and sincere. “Pffft, that’s just something artificers tell people so they can get orange cores cheaper. Blue is a bit better for certain commonly used weapons systems because it is a higher intensity than orange. It’s a bit simpler to implement too, that’s why I gave you that core and not an orange. That and I’m a bit low on orange cores, my… well, I use them a lot.” She put the arms up again and looked at the drill proudly.

“I just have one more question. Why were you silver last night?” she asked.

Ruby froze for a moment, before looking at her quizzically. “What do you mean? I have an orange core, you were probably just hallucinating from bloodloss.” Before Blake could argue Ruby picked up the large metal contraption from the table and started towards the door. “C’mon, I wanna play with my new toy!”

They walked out the front door and down towards the edge of the clearing. The birds were chirping, Blake noticed as Ruby pointed to a tree and declared it the ‘Testing Tree of Trepidation.’ She pointed the device at the tree and pushed artifice into it. The drill whirled to life, the blades lazily turning and the mouth starting to glow with orange wrath.

“Alright, whats going to happen is that a small, thin beam of artifice will shoot out and hit that tree, burning and cutting it down. 3…2…1!”

Ruby pulled the trigger, and a the machine belched once, and then roared, a firey maelstrom exploding forth from its mouth in a twenty foot long cone that incinerated the tree and a few more besides.

“Huh.” Ruby murmured from her place in front of Blake. _Huh indeed._ She thought as she considered, not for the first time, that she may have been saved by a madwoman.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And with the four main characters intros done, thats probably it for this story, at least for a little while. sorry, I hope this little preview was enjoyable.

**Author's Note:**

> Weisstlander, like, wastelander. 
> 
> ...
> 
> I should probably figure out a better name for this.


End file.
